


The Overwatch Metas

by PrettyArbitrary



Series: PA's Metas [2]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Analysis, Character Analysis, Gen, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-26
Updated: 2017-09-14
Packaged: 2019-09-14 16:21:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 9,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16916232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrettyArbitrary/pseuds/PrettyArbitrary
Summary: My Overwatch metas, mostly focusing on Soldier: 76 and Reaper, collected and moved over from Tumblr.





	1. Just how damaged was Jack?

**Author's Note:**

> These metas date from a range of times starting in 2016. There are various parts of them that have since been confirmed or contradicted, but I'm too Tired(tm) to rewrite them to bring them all up to date.

I’ve been thinking about this, and I think 1: he’s pretty damaged but also 2: people are probably underestimating how ruthless he could be to begin with.  His background is primed to make the comparison, but I don’t think he ever was Captain America.

Thought-dump with no real answers because why not?

It’s important to remember that Overwatch was a UN endeavor and that all its members were military.  Jack was their commander.  Their overarching goal was peace and safety for the world’s population, but they themselves were there to put their lives on the line to ensure that happened.

Jack held responsibility for the lives of his team–but not to protect their lives at all costs.  His responsibility was to ensure that if any of them died, it would be for a worthy return.

He was also supposed to have their backs in every other way.  If he COULD get them out without dying; if he COULD get them to a medic in time; to protect them from the politics and agendas of his own superiors in order to let them do their best work without interference.  Team morale, team cohesion, team performance, team security were all ultimately his responsibility.  The health and mental wellness of team members might have been more on Mercy, but they were Jack’s business and obligation insofar as it affected team dynamics.

Clearly he failed at some of that, on a very personal level.  And for however much Blackwatch and his falling-out with Reyes were responsible for Overwatch’s downfall, Jack was to that degree personally responsible for Overwatch’s downfall.  And clearly it was to a significant enough degree that, according to Mercy, a number of Overwatch’s members tried to intervene and mediate over the years, which implies that not only could they not mend the rift, but they were unable or unwilling to stay professional about it.

So you’d think Jack would be carrying around a fair amount of guilt over his own role in the downfall of his organization.  Except that what we see instead is massive disillusionment.  He doesn’t seem to have much taste for Overwatch in hindsight at all.  He only grudgingly admits he even HAS good memories from his time with Overwatch–and considering that was like 30 years of his life, that’s pretty impressively awful.  It’s also interesting, considering that it seems pretty hard to argue that Overwatch didn’t make a massive positive difference in the world.  Even if it did fall apart spectacularly in the end, it seems like being part of that shining moment in history, however brief it was and however tainted it may’ve eventually become, is objectively something to be proud of. So whether it’s what went down with Gabriel, or UN politics or just hardcore burnout, whatever Jack went through seems to have poisoned him against pretty much the entire enterprise (although not all the people–he’s clearly still got a soft spot for old comrades).

But from there it’s pure speculation, because there are so MANY possible reasons for that.  It could be the kind of taint that falls over memories of deep emotional investment that you get in a situation like a divorce.  “I put so much of myself into this, and in hindsight I feel like a gullible ass.”  It could be that as Strike Commander, the guy responsible for interfacing directly with greater international politics, he knew something the others didn’t.  

Also, here’s a fact, given his history: he was always a soldier, and they turned him into a politician.  That’s de rigueur for military officers who hit the upper ranks, but normally it takes active ambition and desire to reach the rank and power of colonel or above (you know, like Gabriel had).  I don’t know what brass Jack would’ve worn on his dress uniform, but that’s probably comparable to the authority he’d have wielded as head of Overwatch.  And then god knows what kind of bullshit he would’ve had to put up with whenever the nations decided to use his group to play schoolyard politics with each other, or how seedy he felt when they trotted him out to play Captain America for the masses (even if he wasn’t, you know that’s how they painted him).  So it’s possible that he’s so burned out on responsibility, a world’s adulation and then hatred and maybe even imposter syndrome that in hindsight he sees the whole thing as a toxic mess that was destined to fail.  Or at least that toward the end, he got so sick of telling people pretty, halfassed lines about how they were ‘working on solutions’ when the reality was that everything was a juddering wreck of international embarrassment and internecine squabbling that he was ready to celebrate when it finally crashed and burned.  

Or…something.  Who knows?  Not us.  For all they’ve given us, Jack could’ve been the bad guy and Gabriel was the one trying to save everything and now they’re both stomping around in vast seas of regret for their lives and choices.


	2. Just how damaged was Jack?

Someone asked for my thought-dump on Soldier: 76 and why he’s so messed up, and shall receive.

Jack is just so BURNED by it all. I mean check out his Watchpoint: Gibraltar lines:

  * “Lot of memories of this place. They weren’t all bad.”
  * “Bring back Overwatch. What’s the point?”
  * “Would have been better to let this all go…”



He’s done with Overwatch. He worked for it for so long, fought tooth and nail for it even when it was going down in flames, and it cost him Ana and Gabriel, his own reputation, and if it hadn’t been for the HQ explosion, it might’ve cost him his freedom. From the few specifics we have on the nature of the leaks, it sounds like they included war crimes and violations of military law, meaning he (and probably Gabriel and a number of others) would have faced court martial.

But here’s the thing about the leaks: they were true! It wasn’t a false smear campaign. That stuff got leaked to the press, and then they investigated and discovered the accusations were well-founded. And Jack, the golden boy who’d stood atop it all for years, of course he was burned down along with his organization. Whomever was actually carrying all that stuff out, he was in charge and it was his responsibility to be aware and to deal with it.

And who knows? Maybe he did know. I have a hard time imagining that he could’ve been in any way an effective commander and have been utterly oblivious of that much questionable activity going on under his nose for so long. I mean, I’m pretty sure he didn’t know about ALL of it, but some? 

The jury is out for me on that, but even if he did know, I don’t necessarily consider it a blanket condemnation of his character. The problem is that Jack was a soldier, not a superhero. He was trained as a soldier, thought like one. When it came to issues of world peace and stability, he would have tackled them as a soldier. If he believed that kidnapping or assassinating a single figure that HE KNEW was an active war criminal even if he couldn’t fork over the evidence on paper to prove it…would it have been beyond understanding if he’d done it?

We already have Ana in her Origins short talking about the dissonance between being a good person who wants to preserve life, and having to become a killer in order to do so most effectively. While it’s a particularly pertinent issue for a sniper, she can’t have been the only one of them to feel it. “We’ve all got it coming” is one of Jack’s voice lines. He’s clearly carrying some guilt (and anger), whether it’s over the things he did as a soldier, the things he did as leader of Overwatch, or the things he failed to stop.

But whether targeted killing and covert manipulation of world affairs, or whatever Overwatch got up to, are the best, least lethal options for a peacekeeping military force or not, they’re not heroic. The world wanted them to be heroes, and whatever was going on beneath the surface, Jack seems to have done his level best to present himself and Overwatch in the image the world wanted.

The image the world needed, really. When the world came out of the Omnic Crisis, it must have been in a shambles. Maybe civilization was literally in tatters, with supply chains disrupted and shortages of food and fresh water and health care; or maybe it was just catastrophic social unrest, as humans as a species turned against the new sentient race they’d created to share the world with them and began to destroy them out of fear.

Either way, the world must have been a wreck, and people were terrified. They needed hope, they needed to believe that things could get better, that someone was out there who had things under control. And Jack–regardless of anything else, this is the best and most important thing he ever did, and the reason I think he earned his position no matter what else happened–Jack worked to make people believe that they themselves could be better. That each person had it in them to be a hero and leave the world better than they found it. We’re told he led Overwatch to inspire an entire generation of people around the world.

But that must have come at a massive personal sacrifice. In the media materials, other characters talk about how Jack was their moral compass, how he was the biggest hero in a whole lineup of heroes. Imagine trying to live up to that, in a world even more saturated with media and connectivity than we are today. Imagine having to live almost every moment of every day in this persona that’s been created for you–because the world needs it.

And that sets up the dichotomy that ripped him and Overwatch apart. If you present yourself as a hero and then act as something else (whether Jack did so personally or just the organization as a whole, whether he even knew just what a big lie it was, because among other things he was a symbol), eventually that’s going to come out, and when it does, all hell will inevitably break loose.

In their voice lines, Gabriel chews Jack out for playing Boy Scout. Jack himself says he’s ‘not playing by the rules anymore.’ This seems to imply that he tried to before, so hard and for so long that it became a point of contention. I can imagine Jack and Gabriel’s falling out being driven partly by this: Jack trying too hard to be perfect, to make Overwatch perfect, to live up to an ideal it could never reach and that perhaps actually handicapped its effectiveness. I can imagine them disagreeing about the most important priority: Jack arguing that what they needed most was to offer the world hope, to make people feel empowered, and Gabriel arguing that their mandate was to ACT, to preserve stability and peace. I can imagine them arguing because Gabriel always knew it would lead to what it did, with the world turning against them, and Jack arguing maybe that it didn’t have to come to that, or maybe that it would be worth it even if it did.

Jack definitely feels betrayed. In his Origins short, Jack talks about Overwatch being brought down by its enemies, from both within and without. It also seems likely that some of the things that came out, the command team HADN’T known about, because Mercy and Jack both say that Overwatch is better off gone, and we have Gabriel going on a revenge bender, either to keep it down or at least to take out the people he considers responsible. If any of them had known about ALL if it all along, then presumably they wouldn’t have such a problem with it now. And I have no doubt that Jack contributed enough of his own bad calls to help things along, because the cold truth of leadership is that you WILL screw up sometimes, and you and everyone you lead will have to live with the consequences.

But maybe not everything he did was a bad call. Maybe some of it was altruistic, knowing that it was what the world needed even if it would cost him and the people who answered to him. And if he put that much of himself and everything he worked for on the line, only to have everything he’d worked for twisted and corrupted out from under him…can you imagine how much that has to hurt?

I’m sure it’s not just him, either. Mercy seems to feel it, too. Reinhardt’s big heart seems to ache because he STILL believes in everything they fought for, even though the way it turned out did so much damage. I like to think Gabriel’s long burn comes from the same place. But Jack is where the buck stopped. Ultimately it all has to sit on his shoulders, regardless of how much of it is his personal fault.

So you could see this whole ‘grizzled old soldier’ approach as an utter retreat from any trace of the hero/leader persona of Jack Morrison–maybe even a traumatized retreat, because trying to do the right thing for so long, trying to be the hero the world wanted him to be, burned him so badly. To him, it not only failed, it played into destroying everything and everyone he cared about, AND it hobbled him from preventing what eventually happened. So now he’ll just be a soldier, no one important (which is probably a gigantic relief) except that he’s got a big gun he can aim at whomever was responsible.


	3. Reaper Meta

Since I did a long meta on Jack, I want to do one on Gabriel now.

The thing I’ve been thinking about him is that to figure him out, you really need to take his history in the military into account. 

Like, okay. At the point we meet him, we can’t really argue that he isn’t bad news. Revenge quest aside, he’s working as a professional killer for hire and is willing to take jobs from a known terrorist organization of which he was previously an enemy.

But you need to think about where he came from. Gabriel was in black ops. Since he was chosen to lead the first Overwatch task force, he was probably in black ops before he ever joined the SEP. And the thing about the military in general, but particularly work like that, is that it doesn’t work according to civilian moral codes. Just by dint of signing up for the military, you are agreeing to be involved in activities that civilian society tends to ingrain into us as Wrong. 

Anyone who goes into the military has to work themselves into a new mindset compared to what they got in civilian life. This is honestly part of the point of boot camp and why it’s so grueling. There’s psychological reconditioning involved. You re-learn your loyalties and you re-learn what’s acceptable in protecting them. You learn to accept that there are times when violence, even killing, is the appropriate and needed response. You learn that your team is the highest and most immediate priority, because their survival is synonymous with your survival.

So Gabriel–and everybody else on the original Overwatch strike force, because all of them were military–is starting from this point, where violence is acceptable and sometimes necessary in order to safeguard their own people and society at large.

Special operations in general, and black ops in particular, are several further steps down this road. If violence is sometimes necessary, then targeted violence may sometimes be necessary and preferable–because if you can take out a small group who are the real threat rather than have to shoot your way through an army of guys who’re just fighting for their own people, that’s preferable, right? If targeted violence is preferable because it can save lives and contain damage, then what’s the difference between that and other questionable actions you perform along the way?

One of the things the Army Special Forces (aka Green Berets) do in the real world is, they go to other countries and train the people in militias and rebellions there in how to kill and wage war. That’s one of the things they’ll admit to. Stuff that might fall under black ops is supplying those people with guns (this is known as ‘arms proliferation’ and is illegal but it’s a matter of history that the US military has done it). Capture and interrogation of strategically significant enemies (with a side of torture). Assassination. Infiltrating areas where they are not publicly authorized to operate. All kinds of stuff ranging from ‘so strategically sensitive we’ll lie to your face about it’ to ‘we’d be burned at the stake if anybody could prove we’d authorized this.’

And this is the kind of work we can figure Gabriel did when he was one of the ‘good guys’ with the US Armed Forces (and presumably, later Blackwatch).

But why do guys agree to sign up for this stuff? Each of them has to find their own reasons. They’re not necessarily bad people. Some of them might think that someone has to do the dirty work to keep the world safe and stable, so it might as well be them. Some of them like the challenge. Some of them are convinced they’re the ‘good guys’ and so whatever they do is right by definition. We don’t know Gabriel’s personal motivations for sure, but we know that he CARES. You don’t fuel a masked multi-year revenge bender on apathy. And the fact that he stuck around Overwatch for all those years before he ever made his move implies that either that he didn’t see something that required that sort of reaction till the end, or else that he spent a lot of time looking for less extreme methods of fixing whatever he thought was going wrong before he went for general mutiny.

So after Overwatch goes down, Gabriel goes off and becomes a masked mercenary. Well, now he’s killing people for money, rather than for duty and country. But as far as we know, he’s not killing civilians. He’s killing other people who put themselves out there as armed targets on the battlefield. It’s still seedy, but there’s an implied agreement there, when you walk into a conflict zone with a weapon, that you are willing to accept the potential consequences that go with it.

But he’s also doing it because he’s still got a cause–whatever it is, exactly. We’ve got hints that maybe he feels personally wronged. Or maybe, like Jack, he wants justice for what happened and he thinks he’s the only person who can get it. Whatever he’s after, he’s walking a nasty path to get it, there’s no denying that. But when you’re thinking about him as a character, it’s important to remember that a lot of that moral compromise happened a long time ago, back when he was squarely one of the ‘good guys.’ He didn’t suddenly flip into villain mode and throw away everything he’d believed in. This–at least most of this–is who he’s been for a good 30 years or more, even back when he was a friend and leader to many of the other characters. He’s always been a man willing to do some terrible things for what he believed were the right reasons.


	4. On Overwatch as an Organization

**Anonymous asked: Hey, fandom tropes anon here, I wanna ask more things about OW. For you personally, what is Overwatch as an organization? I mean, they are paramilitary, yet they do research on Moon and have Ecopoints. Angela's research on medicine is understandable, but Overwatch meddling on global warming is kind of weird. Then Uprising comic came around. Overwatch is handled by UN, right? Why can't UN help/become 'middleman' for British government and OW?**

Hey! Okay, so the UN is super-complicated, really, and nobody actually fully understands it? Let alone me. It’s not like I’ve made a deep study of it.

But this question: **Why can’t UN help/become ‘middleman’ for British government and OW?**

Is pretty simple. The UN has mediators who could help. But it’s also entirely possible Jack already tried that. This crisis has been going on for weeks, according to the news reel in Jack’s office. He’s been through it repeatedly with the British PM. So presumably he’s already exhausted every possible persuasive tool he has access to.

As for this one: **Overwatch is handled by UN, right?**

Overwatch is PART of the UN. The UN is the General Assembly, the Security Council, AND a whole lot of other groups and councils that focus on a large number of issues around the world, including health, human rights, environment, nuclear armaments, world trade and more. Overwatch is one of those groups. This, incidentally, is the reason for the color of Jack’s coat and why they all wear that same bright blue in the comic. It’s UN blue, the signature color of the United Nations.

**Finally: What is Overwatch as an organization?**

After Uprising, my theory on what Overwatch is has changed. Now, I think it’s something that isn’t comparable to anything that exists in the real world.

Basically, I think Overwatch came into existence in the first place because the Omnic Crisis created a unique situation, where this little group of heroes–and I think they all were actual bona fide do-gooder ‘save the world even if it costs me my life’ heroes–earned the unconditional trust and love of the entire world.

After the Omnic Crisis, I think Overwatch was basically a UN-sanctioned superhero group. They went around wherever they liked to right wrongs and fix problems, and the world gave them all the resources they needed to do it because they saw them as superheroes.

So if Jack and the others were smart, definitely they used that incredible power and authority to tackle global-threat level problems like climate change and clean water.

But Overwatch ONLY really worked as long as people believed Overwatch could do no wrong–as long as people were were so grateful to Overwatch for solving their problem that they didn’t care whether Overwatch had solved the problem in a way all the factions involved actually liked.

Because in the real world, if you make the US happy, you probably piss off Russia or China. If you invade Egypt to fight the guy who got himself elected by buying the favor of the Egyptian military but everybody knows he’s really an oppressive racist dictator…well, you’re still outsiders invading a country and fucking with it. When you get asked to go help with a famine in the Sudan, and you get there, look around and say, “Hey, I see your actual problem here is that you’re spending all your resources committing genocide on a large minority of your population?” the response you get is, “Excuse us, did anybody ask you?”

So once the world settled down, governments started wanting to do things their own way again. And Overwatch maybe spent some of their good credit on settling a couple Syria-style incidents that were going to piss people off no matter which side they took. And long story short, that unreal worldwide enchantment with them began to wear off.

And then people find out about Blackwatch and the fact that this whole time, Overwatch has periodically just been going, “You know what, screw getting permission or even telling anybody what we’re doing, we’ll just SNEAK into Egypt and assassinate that guy.”

And you end up with the British PM going, “AHAHAHAHA you know I think we’ll take our chances with the omnic terrorists, thanks.” And Jack going, “Well, great, now I can either let thousands die or else piss off the whole world by invading freaking Great Britain after it specifically told me to stay out.”

While I’m at it, I think maybe this is what Jack and Gabriel were fighting about for so long.

I think maybe Jack would say things like, “We should at least ASK somebody before we go in to assassinate that questionably elected dictator.”

And Gabe would say, “Oh come on! If we ask for permission, we won’t get it, and then loads of people will die and a war will break out.” 

And then maybe Jack would say, “Yes, that is true, but it’s still not OUR country and there is a way these things are done because consent of the governed is important.”

And Gabe would ask, “Are the governed even being given the option to consent in this case?”

And Jack might say, “No, but the governed in this case also haven’t actually signed on to having some guys in armor from another country come crashing into their country to kill a few of them.” Or, instead he might say, “Yeah, I guess that is a good point. Okay, go on in and kill a small handful of people from another country that we’ve unilaterally decided are too unpleasant to live.” Or maybe, if Gabe couldn’t convince Jack, he might or might not go off and do it anyway.

Because are your options, there. Ask for permission to meddle and save lives, and risk being turned down and having to watch those people die. Or don’t ask for permission, and become a really creepy group that decides the fate of the world from the shadows, although at least it saved thousands of lives while it was changing the course of your country’s future without the citizens’ permission.

So anyway, I think that is why Overwatch happened, and also why in the game there’s dialogue like, “Overwatch was shut down for a reason” and “Maybe people don’t need Overwatch anymore.” Because some ideas, as utopian as they may be, can only work in certain specific times and places. But I also think that Overwatch did immense good in its time, probably saved the world at least twice if you count climate change, and maybe made a small but lasting mark in the way of inspiring people to stand up and fight together against injustice and suffering.


	5. Uprising comic

I JUST NEED TO TALK ABOUT HOW FUCKED Jack is in this comic, though?

This is just the ultimate in ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t.’ The news is blistering with ‘Overwatch anti-sovereignty?’ ‘Japanese government complains about Blackwatch!’ ‘Investigation into Cairo Incident!’ ‘New civilian leader for Overwatch?’ Everybody is mad at them and criticizing every move they make. Jack’s position is being threatened. He says himself that Overwatch can’t afford another PR nightmare.

And then all his agents are telling him how they NEED to go into London, despite the Prime Minister telling them to stay out. People are going to die if they don’t! They won’t be able to handle the fallout if they wait!

I mean you can see how Overwatch could have come to this. There are so many crises all the time, all over the world, and as an international entity, you have to choose: do you go in and help people even if you’re being told not to? What gives you the right, when you’re supposed to be serving and protecting the governments of the world? But then what if there’s a genocide happening, or the government itself is deliberately persecuting part of its own population? Floods? Rampant disease? If you don’t intervene, then people die. If you do, then you’re violating international borders. Either way, as the guy making the call, you’re screwed. You’ve got the blood of thousands on your hands, or else you’re a walking diplomatic incident. But meanwhile, the world’s governments are getting more and more unhappy with you because you keep meddling in their affairs.

Jack chooses–for probably the thousandth time–to save lives, even if they’ll all pay for it. We might be seeing the very moment when Jack murders his career and takes Overwatch with it. 

_(#it’s the same debate that happens with the UN #who has what power #and if u go into a country without the permission of the government u r effectively undermining the sovereignty of that nation #that action is usually considered an act of invasion and/or war #interesting thought)_

These things exactly. Overwatch IS the UN, or at least a part of it.

At this point, what I’m thinking the Uprising comic shows us is that for a golden 10 or 20 years after the Omnic Crisis, Overwatch HAD that blanket permission, almost by default, to enter pretty much anywhere they wanted to go. And that maybe Jack asked for permission every time anyway, because if he hadn’t then eventually things would have blown up, because if you have tacit permission to go into your neighbor’s house whenever you want, and eventually one time you do that and you break something, there’ll be hell to pay.

But things blew up anyway, because eventually Overwatch started making calls the nations didn’t like and there was hell to pay anyhow.

But also, Overwatch abused that trust through Blackwatch, because Blackwatch DID go in without actively asking and did what they thought they needed to whether anybody else liked it or not. And when that came out, again, there was hell to pay.

Jack’s method of going by the book eventually, inevitably, wrecked them. Gabriel’s method of taking advantage of the trust they were given to do what he thought needed to be done also eventually, inevitably, wrecked them. If Ana had been in charge? Her way, whatever it was, however she threaded that needle, would probably have eventually, inevitably, wrecked them. Because Overwatch’s failure wasn’t about anybody making the wrong call. It happened because the conditions that let them operate in the boundaryless, unconditional way that let them change the world so drastically and tackle issues as elaborate as climate change–those conditions were ephemeral and were never going to last. The very nature of Overwatch that let it be such a heroic, inspirational success in one political climate where also what destroyed it when that climate reverted back to normal.

And this is a bit more speculation, but now I wonder if all the fighting and destruction at the end were about: Who gets to own Overwatch after its founders are removed from the picture? As long as Jack and Gabriel and the rest were there, no one could really wrest it from them. Whether people liked them or not or agreed with their methods any longer, they created it. They WERE it. Only once they either willingly passed on the mantle or were forcibly removed from the picture could Overwatch pass into other hands.

And look at what we’ve got. We’ve got Jack and Ana and Gabriel putting things into the hands of young people like Tracer, Mercy and McCree. We SEE them grooming the next generation, the agents with the kind of mettle and heroism to continue to uphold Overwatch according to their original vision. And we have news scrolls accusing Overwatch of being ‘anti-progress,’ asking if the next leader will be a civilian. A civilian who, incidentally, is breathing down Jack’s neck. The leadership of the next generation of Overwatch is in active contention.

We also know that Reinhardt was forced into retirement. Ana was assassinated (at least attempted) by someone who must have had inside intel on where Ana could be found on that mission. Jack and Gabriel were killed by what, in context, seems like a very convenient explosion. Someone systematically eliminated the obstacles.

And there is also a running theme through the lore of shady corporate/political collaboration, of the sort that in the real world leads to bought elections and the gentrification of poor communities and defense contractors sometimes seeming to run the military more than the military does. And just imagine what Overwatch in civilian hands–civilian hands that can be nudged or bought–could do. Imagine a civilian-led Overwatch ‘saving’ a war-torn nation by selling it off to a firm like Vishkar. Even more of the same bloated corporate corruption that plagues us today.

Imagine Jack and Gabriel both seeing this, and fighting about the right move. Destroy Overwatch so it can’t be misused? Or pass it on to another generation who can be trusted with it? They’re both perfectly good solutions, and they both have perfectly good rebuttals. Neither of them was wrong.

But in the end, whatever went down between Jack and Gabriel and whatever other forces were entangled in this, Overwatch was scrapped as a lost cause. NOBODY got it.

And on top of this, Gabe looks just 1000% done? Like, he’s had it with this, you turkeys, he’ll just do his job and you go hero it up or whatever.

And that attitude makes so much sense if this is how Jack’s been operating? Like. If you stay in the open, like Jack does, then you’ve got two options: you either save lives no matter who you piss off doing it, or else you back off when the people in charge tell you to and you let it happen.

Gabe seems to take option #3: lie to them and then go do what you want under the radar anyway.

And maybe that’s what he and Jack fought about so bitterly. But Jack chose his path, and now Gabe’s just waiting for it all to finish burning down around them, because that’s the only way this was all going to go.

Imagine that argument, though. Which do you pick: martyrdom, becoming a puppet, or meddling in world affairs with total lack of transparency or accountability?

Also, no wonder if the UN wanted Jack’s head after a stunt like this. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were talking about court martialing him.

Also also, no wonder if they worried about former Overwatch agents going vigilante after they shut it down. They were basically willing to operate that way even when they had authority.

Hey. So on that thought, new take on the gunfight and explosion that brought down Overwatch. What if Jack and Gabriel weren’t fighting each other at all? What if they were fighting together, against someone else? Someone trying to finish this, kill them and take things over. 

What if, even, THEY were the ones who set the explosion? If it came to this, then better they die and Overwatch fall entirely than let their enemies have it? If maybe Gabriel is so angry because Jack got out by himself and didn’t take Gabriel with him? And whatever reasons Jack might’ve had, Gabriel can only see it as an abandonment.  
Or what if, even, they WERE legitimately arguing but were interrupted? “The way it should’ve been.” Their own little fight to settle things between themselves, instead of shattered faith, painful scars and ghosts.


	6. Why quarantine the Omnic god AIs instead of destroying them?

**Anonymous asked: Why quarantine the Omnic god AIs instead of destroying them?**

That’s a very good question! To me, the most obvious reasons for quarantining them rather than destroying them would be 1: because destroying them was too difficult, or 2: they wanted to keep the God Programs for study. 

We should look at the likely mechanisms of sentient AIs here. AI (artificial intelligence) these days has moved out of the realm of sci-fi and now refers to a well-respected field of study in computing. We have AI now, at this very minute, and those of us with an internet connection use it many times every day. But AI does not automatically mean ‘sentient.’ Our AIs are computer systems mainly built of layers of code: sets of programs that interact with each other to simulate certain specific processes of higher intelligence. They are designed to learn and adapt so that we can automate small but work-intensive processes, for example, refining and personalizing your search results, identifying digital visual images, etc. 

The AI we have in the modern world is not, to the best of anyone’s ability to discern, sentient.

But of course in the age of Overwatch, there absolutely are sentient AIs. As we’ve seen with Zenyatta, they have emotion, compassion, a sense of humor, a sense of a deeper spiritual existence–the whole shebang.

But Omnics are embodied. Literally, they have bodies. Whatever code packages make up their digital thought patterns and sentient minds, those packages are grounded in physical forms. Physical forms are, by definition, limited. Your body has boundaries. Omnics’ bodies have boundaries. And even though the discipline of cybernetics (another important concept for the future-science of Overwatch) is the study of how we can modify those boundaries through tools and prosthetics, our best understanding of sentience now indicates that consciousness and self-awareness are intimately entwined with an embodied experience. Short and sweet: you exist as an individual being because you have a body. If you didn’t, then there would be no reason for you to even have a sense of yourself as a unique organism that’s separate from everything around you.

So here’s my theory on what the God Programs might be, and where they get their name. My guess is that they are sentient AIs that don’t have bodies, that were DESIGNED not to have bodies. They might not even be smarter or better or more advanced than the latest generation of Omnics. After all, as of the time of the game, the youngest possible God Programs are now at least 30 years old. That’s eons, at the speed technology advances. Fareeha’s comic even notes that they’re considered old and obsolete now, even though they’re still powerful.

But if this is the case, then even if they’re old and slow by modern standards, they would have unique and terrifyingly powerful capabilities–ones that even their more advanced but embodied-and-therefore-limited cousins couldn’t replicate. The God Programs could have been able to control and automate vast systems. We don’t know a lot about the Omniums, but we know they’re enormous and have powerful reactor cores. I have HUGE QUESTIONS about why humans would’ve decided building entire nuclear-powered factory cities to build sentient robots, POWERED BY SENTIENT AIS that apparently were left to their own devices, would be the best way to go about this, but…apparently that was the situation? (WHO OWNED THESE THINGS? Governments? Corporations? WTF, people.)

Think about what they could do. God Programs would be SUPER USEFUL, maybe even invaluable, for doing things like controlling and maintaining the next generation of electrical smart grids across large regions. For maintaining the super-speed activities of the stock market, able to police and monitor criminal activity or unstable patterns that move faster than human thought. For managing inhumanly enormous data libraries such as the ones that flow through multinational corporations or organizations like the FBI or the World Bank. They could build and test models beyond human capability, mapping out disease models for the CDC and modeling the far edges of the universe for NASA. Because they’re made to be disembodied, to operate without a need for limits, God Programs would have the reach and the psychological capacity to perform tasks that are simply utterly beyond human–or probably Omnic–ability.

But if this is the case, then the God Programs would be more truly alien compared to human thought than any embodied Omnic. Human predilection for xenophobia aside, that would make them potentially difficult to communicate with and understand. It means their reasoning for the things they do might be something simply out of reach of human logic, without a lot of work.

I’m not saying humans in the Overwatch universe ever necessarily ran amok with sentient AI to that extent. But they must have at least flirted with the idea. We’ve had a fascination with sentient computers since the early 1900s that stems from the combination of our awareness that at some point, humans will need to develop this technology if we are to move beyond certain limits together with our fear of doing so, because we instinctively know that we’d be putting our future in the hands of these beings.

So, what the God Programs probably are is an early model of those sentient AI systems. Whether they used God Programs for anything else (I wonder about Athena, for example), they definitely used the God Programs to build Omnics. And the fear among humanity probably is: if the God Programs could go off the rails, then is the foundation that made that happen present in EVERY Omnic? At any given moment, is humanity living alongside a race of time bombs ticking down toward genocide? So I think they kept the God Programs so they could study them. Try to pinpoint what it was in their digital minds that made the Omnic Crisis happen, so that they could recognize it and control it and stop it from happening again.

But on that note, I refer you back to the question: WHO BUILT THE OMNIUMS? Who built the God Programs? Because there seems to be a general assumption that the God Programs simply went off the rails and decided to do this themselves…but I would remind you that whoever built them had an opportunity to exert a formative level of control on these newly created minds, maybe even to insert a back door of command and control. And depending on who made them, it’s possible it wasn’t the God Programs that made this decision at all.


	7. S76 as a soldier and the symbolism of his commando skins

Just think about completely Jack identifies as a soldier. There’s so much there, both good and bad. He’s been doing this since he was eighteen. He’s never been anything else, never known anything else.

Like he does it because he believes what he’s doing is right, but also there are issues of indoctrination there; both military and maybe from his family background, if he comes from your conservative blue-collar flag-waving ‘rah rah USA’ midwestern kind of home. He’s not dumb. He’s clearly aware of politics and the potential for moral compromise and that kind of thing. I don’t think he has an uncritical belief that the military can do no wrong. It’s just that I wonder how much of the soldier thing is “this is what he wanted to be” and how much of it was kind of his environment deciding his path for him?

And yet he HAS made the best of it. I don’t think you can argue against that. He’s clearly tried hard to what he believed was the right thing. He helped save the world. He built basically a superhero team. Inspired an entire generation to try to be better. To stand up as heroes in their own right.

But still it feels a bit like he never got to be anything else, whether he wanted to or not, and eventually he stopped even trying. There’s no glimpse of the multiple facets you see with the other characters. Even Gabriel shows a wicked sense of humor and an artistic interest in costume design. But Jack? I mean. MAYBE golf, but that’s only assuming the whole Summer Games deal wasn’t just a total lark. He seems to have made soldiering and Overwatch his entire identity.

SO HOW ABOUT THOSE COMMANDO SKINS.

Okay so those skins are specifically VIETNAM COMMANDO skins. That’s when Army Special Forces was founded. And there are a few things about the Vietnam War.

1: It resulted in lots of broadly heroic yet melancholy war movies about personal sacrifice & loss for the greater good and/or FOR YOUR BROTHERS. Because let’s be clear about a thing regarding the Army: your #1 loyalty above all is to your brothers. Sisters. Teammates. Over god, country, or even your commanders. That whole ‘band of brothers’ deal, that’s where a lot of the drama comes from in those movies, and it’s not just Hollywood theatrics.

2: Infamously, the vets who came back from the Vietnam War were essentially cast out of US society.

They went and fought a war for their country, because they were told to. A lot of them were drafted. And when they came back, they got spit on. THEY DIDN’T WANT TO BE THERE EITHER, but they were the ones wearing the uniforms, and so all that hate for Vietnam as an unrighteous war got aimed right at them. All they went through, and in return many of them, those who hadn’t already t given their lives, lost their sanity, health and every tie they had left.

I grew up in the 80s & 90s (yeah I’m dating myself), when entertainment media was saturated with a push to rehabilitate the image of those veterans. At that time, a lot of the guys who fought in the war had risen to positions of influence, and many of them used it to try to question what had happened and rehumanize Vietnam veterans as people, even heroes. Whether you want to call it propaganda or making amends, a generation of us steeped in that as cultural context. In Jack’s time, all that media would still be out there for the enjoyment of any fan of war narratives.

And we know Jack likes war narratives. More than one of his voice lines are quotes from the movie “Patton.” So he probably marinated in that stuff.

And in some ways just as importantly, if they’re around my age, then so did the game’s writers and creators. Because they’re the ones who choose the symbolism and associations for each of these characters.

So. The Vietnam War means something specific to people–at least Americans–my age. It means years of struggle against power, a generation fighting for a voice or choice in their own destiny. “Old enough to die but not old enough to vote” was one of the slogans of the time (the reason the voting age was lowered? Vietnam War). A generation of young men forced to fight and then abandoned to suffer when it was over. Who had to spend years in the aftermath working to make their own justice and healing if they wanted it. The current state of Veteran’s Affairs, of PTSD treatment, of so many other things? A RESULT of the Vietnam War. Those things weren’t there for those soldiers. To this day, a disproportionate number of the nation’s homeless and untreated mentally ill are STILL veterans, and in particular Vietnam veterans.

(I know, little of this is new or different for black people & many others. And who’s surprised that the ones who suffered most were black kids, latino kids, poor kids, and others with little recourse to start with? Fun fact: if you could go to college, you could defer the draft till graduation. And with a college degree and skills, you could try getting in as an officer or in some other less cannon foddery position. Chances were you’d still get shot at, but at least you’d have perks and maybe some protections.)

So all of this means that associating Jack with those skins–regardless of whether they’re a depiction of Jack’s own self-image or not–is Saying Something about how the creators see him, his current situation and mindset.


	8. Doomfist and Jack Morrison

**Anonymous asked: Um... if DoomFist is all super Scary Darwin like, 'only the strong will survive'. Then what must he think of ultimate survivor Jack Morrison!? The man survived the Omnic war, years of running OverWatch, the explosion (that may or may not have killed Gabe) and running around playing vigilante even now.**

He probably sees Jack–along with most of Overwatch–as shining examples of his own philosophy who’ve drawn horribly, frustratingly misguided conclusions from it.

Jack and the rest of the original team fought through the Omnic Crisis. They WON the Omnic Crisis. They are the very embodiment of ‘conflict breeds strength.’ They faced the worst the world could throw at them and came out heroes capable of transcending human limits.

I submit to you, in fact, a young Akande who might even have dreamed of having a place on that team. Of being one of the great modern heroes of the world, of going into the very heart of the monster with them and slaying it and coming out victorious.

But then? Then they set about rebuilding the world so nobody else would have to fight like they did. And so did the Overwatch recruits that came after them, both the first round who’d probably fought in the war themselves, and the next generation who’d been kids when it happened, forged in the fires of terror and sacrifice. He watched these people, the best, brightest and bravest the world had to offer, systematically eradicating the challenges he personally needed in order to thrive.

In this way, I see him as a dark mirror reflection of Pharah. She’s lived many of the same dreams he has. She’s been given some of the same opportunities–she’s from a prestigious family, given the opportunity to associate with the world’s best and greatest and be mentored by them–and she drew many of the same conclusions about what she personally needed: to fight, to test herself constantly, to be the absolute best she could be and stand with the world’s greatest warriors and heroes as their equal.

But her mom took the time to show her the value of peace and the sanctity of life, and how every person should have the right to decide how they live. Instead of believing her dream should be the way of the world at large, she envisioned herself as the bulwark between the world and threats to it.

Akande hung out with people who fed his thirst for conflict and his self-righteousness. They encouraged him to take that need for conflict in his own heart and believe in it as the right way for everybody. And that by extension, Overwatch was trying to make the world and the people lived in it into something smaller. Something that never had to fight for its life. Something that would never know its own limits because nothing would ever test them.

Akande reminds me of a thing from Tolkien, actually. That when a great evil falls, the world is diminished. When Sauron falls, he takes the power of the rings with him, and that includes the power that sustains marvels like Lothlorien and Rivendell. There’s a lot to be said for a smaller, more peaceful world and the beauties and opportunities that come with it. But for some people, it doesn’t make up for the losses: the lack of heroes or the chance to become one, because none are needed. The loss of the transcendent challenges presented by an overriding menace, and the perilous, knife-edged beauties that can exist only in a place of extremes.

I think this is absolutely how Akande sees the world. For him, a man with the talents and drive to rise to every occasion, the need to be challenged and pushed to his limits, all he can see is the deprivation and diminishing. And, to be charitable toward him, maybe he was marked from a young age by something incredible. I think the world’s people did achieve something great during the Omnic Crisis and after. I think collectively they came together in one of those great and noble pushes we see from time to time in history, those moments when it seems like it must be inevitable that humanity will fall into darkness but then instead they rise in a shining hour that leaves us, on the far side of history, awestruck and wondering what it would have been like to be there and see it for ourselves…

And he was 14, 16, 18, brilliant and fierce and full of potential. And since then, he has spent the rest of his life watching humanity slump back into ordinary days and seeing only their failure to live up. He knows that greatness is in there, and it frustrates him to watch people fritter it away.

Akande is an extremely smart man. I don’t think he’s dumb enough to believe he’s something as simple as a hero for wanting to bring war back to the world. But I think maybe he sees himself as the villain the world needs in order to become something better. Maybe he even thinks of it as a sacrifice he’s willing to make for the ‘good’ of humanity.

But he’s also arrogant, and clearly obsessively competitive, and has possibly made the mistake of confusing ‘heroism’ with ‘glory.’ At the end of the day, this is all driven by what he wants. What feels right to him. We know he hates losing and I have a strong suspicion he absolutely can’t stand the idea of being wrong.

So yeah, I think he probably detests Overwatch and everybody in it for being so much like him and yet coming to an utterly different conclusion about how the world should be. I think he hates Jack Morrison and the other founding members more than almost anybody (except maybe Winston, who is in his way also a brilliant, overachieving reflection of Akande), because they created it. And I also think he is still utterly furious at having been defeated and sent to prison.

I think if he ever knowingly gets the chance to kick Jack Morrison’s ass, he’ll go after him with a screaming yet well-calculated fury. But I think he might feel very smug about the state Jack is in now. He fell. His image was broken. His organization came crashing down around him and he lost everything. He would probably consider Jack Morrison to be demonstrably on the wrong side of history.

He would be thoroughly unwilling to listen to any warning Jack might give him that they might be more alike than Akande wants to admit, or about what happens when you try to reach too high.


	9. Soldier 76's hairline

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The most important meta of all.

Someone on Discord wanted to know how far Soldier: 76′s hairline had receded. I did the math for them.

We know that canonically, Jack is 6'1", or 73 inches tall. In art, it’s generally accepted that the ideal male proportions are that the body is 7.5 heads tall. This means the head is .13 of an ideally proportioned human male’s height.

Assuming, then, that he’s ideal male proportions (which I am because SEP fuckery), Jack’s head is 9.49" inches from crown to chin.

Typically, in art, you can split the face into quarters: chin to nose, nose to outer corner of the eyes, eyes to hairline, hairline to crown.

Jack’s face isn’t exactly perfectly symmetrical along those dimensions. He’s got more chin. I eyeballed it, and assigned that extra .5 inch to his chin, and equalized across the other three portions.

This gives him, in his prime, 2.25 inches from the outer corner of his eyes to his hairline, and from his hairline to his crown.

Comparing the shots of Jack’s younger and older models, we have a convenient sharpening of the brow curve RIGHT about where his youthful hairline started in the ¾ view. 

In older Jack, you can figure where his hairline starts from the part in his hair. Which shows his hairline has receded just about halfway up from its starting point. Or, 1.13 inches. Or, 2.86 centimeters.  
I know you all needed to know this.


End file.
